How I Deconverted: It Started With Humean Skepticism

I have written a number of personal posts about what I was like before I deconverted and then how things went for me when I deconverted. There is more to say about both those periods, but it is time to start explaining how I deconverted. And, philosophically, that started with my discovery of David Hume. I will get to how it started emotionally later. For now, here was the key thought that would shape my theology and philosophy throughout college and then my philosophy for years, but no longer, after I initially abandoned theology.

October 1996-August 2008:

David Hume questioned whether or not we could ever know there were any such things as necessary connections between events such that one kind of thing happening could necessitate that another one follow. Hume wanted to be an absolutely strict empiricist. He did not want to accept any dubious metaphysical principles as true. He wanted to tightly tether our knowledge claims to what we could actually perceive. And we cannot directly perceive causal necessities such that one thing happening requires another thing always to happen. I can see my hand and I can see the flame. Those are empirical facts. I can make the factual observation that I am not experiencing any burning sensations in my hand the moment before I put it in the fire. Then I can follow that up with a different factual observation when my hand is placed in the fire, namely, that my hand now feels a burning sensation. From those facts can I infer that the fire caused the burning sensation and that it necessarily did so?

What if the two events are just correlated but not causally connected in this instance. Well how can we ever know with certainty that any two events that we see together are not just correlated but causally connected in a necessary way? The scientific method is, to put it simplistically, to keep testing to see whether under controlled conditions the result is always as the hypothesis of a given necessary connection would predict. But no matter how many times we observe the supposed cause and the supposed effect, we will never with our eyes literally see, as a visual sense datum, something that we could properly call “necessary causation”.

All our eyes (and our other senses) will ever give us will be the particular experiences. It takes an inference of the mind that there is an invisible thing called “necessary causation” that conjoins the two events. To Hume such an invisible thing sounds suspiciously metaphysical. How can we know there are any such invisible necessities and not just patterns that are so extraordinarily common and usual that they make an enormous impression on our human minds—but which are nonetheless not necessary.

Maybe trillions of physical events of kind A are followed by events of kind B, but every now and then they are not. Or maybe in the future they suddenly and simply will stop correlating altogether. How can we know the future must resemble the past? Has the universe made us some kind of promise that this cannot or will not happen? We can only assume tomorrow the regularities we are accustomed to will be the same as today. This is a reasonable assumption. It is a probablistic assumption that any sane person would be shrewd to live her life by. But, according to Hume, it is not knowledge.

This thought cast a powerful spell over me for a long time, beginning when I was a first semester freshman in college, taking my first two philosophy classes, both of which covered David Hume. My philosopher friends and I would try to explain this to non-philosophers. We would take some familiar object and ask them to watch as we dropped it. And point out to them that they could not see that the opening of the hand caused the ball or the penny or the hat to fall.

We would ask how they knew it would have to fall. It was like performing a magic trick:

“Watch very closely. See my hand open. See the ball fall. Did you see any necessary connection? No? The ball fell with no observable causal mechanism! TA-DA! There is no such thing as cause and effect!”

“But gravity made it fall!”

“What is gravity? When scientists say gravity they refer to a pattern of relationships among objects by which the ways they have always been observed to act when studied has a certain mathematical regularity. But does that make the mathematical pattern and regularity the cause? Is it a mysterious monolithic force of some kind? Is it a unitary thing in nature that acts on other things? Or is it that objects simply behave and the mathematical pattern of “gravity” is our description of how they act, one which tells us nothing about why they act that way and nor gives us any clue as to whether they somehow must always act that way.”

We could develop the most powerful, world-transforming of sciences, but we could never solve this problem of providing any kind of proof that the future must, as a matter of necessity, resemble the past. No matter how fruitfully, verifiably, and mathematically precisely our best sciences could describe and effectively predict events in the world, no experiment could guarantee for us that we had gotten to the essence of the necessary laws or explain what such causal mechanisms were beyond observations of how they happened to work and be quantifiable.

This is a form of radical, global, philosophical skepticism. It is Humean skepticism. Once I learned this way of looking skeptically at the world, it increasingly dominated how I saw everything philosophically and theologically.

Read posts in my ongoing “deconversion series” in order to learn more about my experience as a Christian, how I deconverted, what it was like for me when I deconverted, and where my life and my thoughts went after I deconverted.